The past couple decades have seen the rise of a burgeoning private space industry, one that’s become dominated by companies founded by entrepreneurs who made their original fortunes in industries that couldn’t have been more different. What they’ve accomplished in that timeframe has been staggering making the long standing giants of this industry look archaic by comparison. However their track records for delivering in fields that these new companies can’t yet service is what has kept them going but the time is fast approaching when even their golden tickets will be up for auction. At least one company doesn’t appear to be resting on its laurels however with United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Lockheed-Martin and Boeing, announcing their cut price launch system called Vulcan.
As the banner’s imagery alludes to ULA’s Vulcan is an all-American vehicle, ditching the reliance on Russian built engines that have been the mainstay of their rockets for quite a while now. That’s caused some consternation as of late as the USA tries to wean itself off its reliance for Russia to provide access to space as well as the well publicized failures of a few choice engines. It’s hardly a surprising move given that many other US based companies are looking to bring their manufacturing back on-shore, both for quality control reasons as well as for publicity purposes. Regardless of where its made though what will really define this rocket is how it performs and how much it will cost.
ULA has said that the Vulcan will follow in the footsteps of the Delta-IV, offering multiple configurations from medium-lift all the way up to heavy-lift. The way this will be achieved will be through the use of different sized payload fairings as well as additional strap on solid rocket boosters, allowing the rocket to be configured to match the payload its delivering into orbit. ULA is being rather coy about the range of payloads that Vulcan will be able to service however if it’s anything like the system it will ultimately be replacing it will be a direct competitor to the future Falcon Heavy. At this point I’d usually make a quip about the SpaceX equivalent being vastly cheaper however ULA is aiming for a street price of $100 million per launch which isn’t too far off SpaceX’s projected price for their craft.
This rather extraordinary drop in price (down from some $350 million for a comparable launch on the Delta-IV) comes on the back of making the Vulcan reusable, eliminating a lot of the costs of rebuilding a rocket from scratch for every launch. However unlike the fully reusable system that SpaceX and others are pursuing (which, unfortunately, suffered another failure today) ULA is instead taking a piecemeal approach to reusability with the first part being a mid-air recovery of the engine section using a helicopter. Considering that the engines are among the most expensive components on rockets recovering them only makes sense and, potentially, has a higher chance of succeeding than other approaches currently do.
It’s good to see that the private space industry has been able to put some pressure on the long standing giants, forcing them to innovate or be pushed out of space completely. Whilst Vulcan might still be quite a few years away from seeing its first launch it shows that ULA recognise the position they’re in and are willing to compete their way out of it. Hopefully we’ll see some more details on the actual specifications of this craft sometime soon as depending on the different configurations (and their potential costs) this could even prompt SpaceX to rethink their approach. The result of an innovation war between those two giants can only mean great things for the space industry as a whole and, by extension, us as potential space faring beings.
